A ventricular assist device (VAD), such as a percutaneous intracardiac heart pump assembly, can be introduced in the heart to deliver blood from the heart into an artery. VADs are designed to assist either the right or left ventricle or both at once. When deployed in the heart, a VAD can pull blood from one chamber of the heart and expel it into the aorta or pulmonary artery to facilitate the flow of blood through the heart and throughout the body. In one common approach, VADs are inserted by a catheterization procedure through the femoral artery into the left heart of a patient, or through the femoral vein into the right heart of the patient.
VADs designed for right heart assistance (RVADs) can extend through the pulmonary valve and into the pulmonary artery in order to expel blood into the pulmonary artery. To properly position certain RVADs, the devices must be passed through the inferior vena cava, right atrium, tricuspid valve, right ventricle and finally the pulmonary valve. The stiffness of these RVADs typically must be higher than the stiffness of other cardiac devices (e.g., Swan-Ganz catheters) which are typically smaller and are not designed to prevent displacement due to the force of fluid flow. While the higher stiffness of the RVAD enables long-term use of the device, it may also increase the difficulty of inserting the RVAD. This difficulty is exacerbated in the case of patients with abnormal right heart anatomies because RVADs may be designed based on a mean patient population. In these cases, the relatively stiff cannula of the RVAD can interfere with positioning the device in the pulmonary artery after the device passes through the tricuspid valve. Accordingly, some medical practitioners may experience difficulties in placing the RVAD in certain patients, particularly at the stage of advancing the RVAD through the tricuspid valve toward the pulmonary artery.